INWIT/ˈɪnˌwɪt/

Conscience; inward knowledge; wisdom.

We must thank (or perhaps blame) James Joyce for this word ever appearing in modern writing, since he helped to revive it by using it several times in Ulysses in 1922: “You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson’s bed, clergyman’s daughter. Agenbite of inwit.” It had gone out of the language around the middle of the fifteenth century and would have remained a historical curiosity had not he and a very few other writers of his time found something in it that was worth the risk of puzzling his readers.

It was formed in Middle English from in plus wit, the latter meaning the mind as the seat of consciousness and intelligence (we continue the same idea when we talk about native wit or we describe somebody as having a quick wit). To have inwit meant that you had an inward sense of what was right and wrong.

Modern examples — they’re rare enough for the word to be extremely unlikely to be in anybody’s active vocabulary — almost always echo Joyce’s full phrase agenbite of inwit, which dates from 1340. In that year, a Kentish Benedictine monk named Dan Michelis of Canterbury (often called Michael of Northgate) translated a devotional manual from French into English and gave it the title Ayenbite of Inwit. Ayenbite, or agenbite, is literally “again-bite”, a literal translation of the Latin word meaning “remorse”. This has as its root the verb mordere, to bite (the Romans felt that remorse was the emotion that came back to bite you after the event). The title meant “the remorse of conscience”.

One appearance was in Samuel R Delany’s SF work Nova of 1968: “His fate suggests the agenbite of inwit came too late; flaunting the gods even once reaped a classical reward.” (That’s as he wrote it; Delany has made the classic mistake of confusing flaunt with flout.) Mike Madison’s 2006 book, Blithe Tomato, features it, too: “‘Not at all,’ I said, ‘I’m very happily married,’ but even as I said it I felt the agenbite of inwit, as if I were telling a lie.”

Inwit presents no pronunciation difficulty, but agenbite is another matter — none of the few dictionaries that include it say how it should be said, perhaps because they don’t know. It’s not, after all, a word very likely to be heard over the dinner table.

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